Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
Check out my other blog at taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Nice. He had a couple of years to make sure the Federal website where citizens he is forcing to buy health insurance at their own expense can go to shop for it. (This is the “progressive” Democrats version of “universal health care,” forcing everyone to buy their own insurance if they don't have employer insurance or a government program.) As we all know, despite all this time to get ready, the Federal site was a total bust when it went live October 1st.

Next, he set a promised date of November 30th for the site to be fixed. It wasn't, unsurprisingly.

Finally they got the “front end” working, but the “back end,” the part of the computer system that informs the private insurance companies Obama is forcing people to buy insurance from that people “signed up,” doesn't reliably work. The “solution?” Telling people to call the insurers directly to make sure they're covered. That's it, make people run on an endless treadmill.

Anyway, today's the new deadline to sign up. A guy who can't meet his own deadlines imposes deadlines on millions of others.

Obama's self-avowed “signature achievement,” Obamacare (a term for the “Affordable [sic] Health Care Act law that he has adopted himself as a badge of honor), has shown Obama at his natural, high-handed worse. (Well, maybe I shouldn't say “worse.” There is his reaction to the exposure of the NSA-CIA-FBI police state, his drone assassination “policy,” and a lot more. So there's a lot of competition for the title, “Worst,” here.)

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Assad's newest terror weapon: barrels
of explosives, packed with nails and other such crude shrapnel (of
the type terrorists such as the Boston Marathon bombers and others
employ) and dropping them out of helicopters onto Aleppo. Among the
targets: schools (a favorite Assad target, which he also likes to
firebomb) markets, traffic circles; in other words, where people,
especially young people, congregate and can be slaughtered in
significant numbers. About 200 people have been killed in one day of
such attacks in Aleppo, which along with Damascus is one of Syria's
two major cities. Assad's terror air force is now flying 100 sorties
a day.

The regime also just murdered a doctor
they had held in captivity (and no doubt tortured) for months, days
after cruelly telling his family he was about to be released. The
regime is big on psycho-sadistic touches like that. (The doctor's
“crime” was treating people wounded by the Assad barbarians who
lived in areas Assad lost control of.)

The country has been virtually
destroyed at this point. Actual physical starvation is confronting
many Syrians now. A few days ago 8 infants froze to death, their
families having been driven from their homes.

Yes yes, the rebels have at times
retaliated by killing Alawites and Druze, on the assumption that they
support the regime. And the jihadists have now exerted supremacy over
the original rebels. But this situation has been over two years in
the making. I notice the Saudis and their Gulf satellites aren't shy
about backing the jihadists with arms and money, making the
indigenous rebels no match for them. The jihadists have been killing
off the rebel commanders of the disjointed so-called “Free Syrian
Army” (for lack of a better term for the numerous ad hoc bands
of armed men desperately trying to throw off the yoke of tyranny) and
just stole a warehouse full of non-lethal supplies and vehicles
supplied by the U.S., causing the U.S. to cut off the spigot out of
which they belatedly started dribbling aid this year after about two
years of dithering. (After he leaves the presidency maybe Obama
should try out for a community theater production of Hamlet.)

Remember, this all began with Syrians
protesting for democracy and the Assad regime's “reply” that
consisted of murdering them in the streets. That made it clear that
the decades-long Assad dictatorship, one of the world's most
repressive, would never end except through armed force. That led to
the armed rebellion which at first had the regime on the back foot.
Had the U.S. and its lackey nations meaningfully supported the
rebellion with material aid early on, there is a very good chance
that the regime would have been overthrown.(The base of Assad's
support are the Alawites, which are a small minority of the
population, and even smaller minorities that feel beholden to Assad.)

Here we have again another example of
how impractical amoral power politics can be. Had the U.S.
behaved morally, the practical results would likely have been
better. Now the U.S.' main reason for keeping hands off the situation
(but not lips off, they did plenty of jawboning and jabbering,
exhorting Assad to quit and leave, as if that would ever happen short
of force), namely a fear of jihadists taking advantage of the
situation, is exactly what has happened, since the indigenous,
original rebels are too weak to resist the better armed, better
organized, and fanatical jihadists. (But to be sure, there were
plenty of opportunist phonies sitting in Turkey and elsewhere
claiming to “command” the “Syrian Free Army” or to comprise a
quasi government-in-exile, who hurt the rebellion with their
fecklessness.)

Funny species, homosapiens
is. It wages weird power struggles with its own kind, a few trying to
rule the many, and then organizing the many to attack others to seize
more territory and subjugate more people. This is the story of
several thousands of years of what is deemed “civilization.” (As
if hunter gatherers were barbaric by comparison.)

What is the answer? Surely not to just
throw up one's hands in despair, or affect a jaded, world-weary
attitude, as epitomized by the Harper's magazine editorial
stance, or by the late Gore Vidal. The hard work of activism and
organization is the only possible way to achieve any progress in the
human condition. Which- surprise!- the rulers of every country make
as hard as possible. And with their massive tools of surveillance and
repression, this is especially true of the U.S., which sees it as its
global mission to snuff out all progressive movements everywhere in
the world.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Turns
out the bogus sign language translator the African National Congress
ruling party came up with for the big political show they staged to
mark the death of Nelson Mandela, the iconic former ANC leader and
first post-apartheid president of South Africa, is a diagnosed
schizophrenic with a self-admitted history of violence. You'd think
that wouldn't be so hard to ascertain, by, say, a records check, or
talking to people who knew him. You'd also think that a national
government would already have a list of reliable translators they'd
used before, or could call a reputable organization of deaf people or
that serves the death to find someone. [1] But I guess the
farewell ceremony for the head of the liberation struggle, the
political giant who led the ushering in of the post-apartheid era,
the man on whom the ANC rests its very legitimacy today, just didn't
seem very important to the ANC hacks who run the country now. The ANC
couldn't even get it together to provide promised buses to take the
people they misrule to the site of the ceremony.

For
the televised ceremony (watched by an estimated hundreds of
millions), attended by thousands in person (the stadium where the
event was staged seats 93,000), the “translator” provided “a
mush of jibberish” in the words of the BBC, meaningless hand
gestures for the deaf. An ANC government mouthpiece offed this
excuse; “he became overwhelmed,” she said. Actually he's mentally
ill. And as I said yesterday, I think he was seeking attention.

Now
he's running around giving media interviews, explaining his behavior
by saying “angels” “visited” him on stage, hallucinations
that are a sure sign of mental illness (or of acceptable religious
fanaticism). The BBC sees one important issue as being; was he a
security threat to nearby political poobahs, in particular Obama?

The
BBC put the fool schizoid on the radio, giving him more of the
attention he apparently craves. Who cares what this moron mental case
says? (I can tell you it was uninformative and unedifying,
predictably. But in the age of celebrity culture, the media makes
instant celebrities even of mentally ill hustlers like this.)

The
BBC wastes a lot of time with pointless filler like this. Since they
fired so many of their journalists, they do a lot of that these days.
(They also use up hours with guests opining on the day's news,
another way to save money- they don't have to pay the gabheads who
leap at the free exposure, nor pay to fill up time with actual
reporting.)

Just
to make the day perfect, the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu was
burglarized while he was at the observance for Mandela. A perfect
symbol of the anarchy, social breakdown, and incredibly high crime
rate in the slowly-decaying country.

The
following essay, posted yesterday, already said the rest of what
needs to be said about this episode and the publicity event staged to
promote and glorify the ANC, foreign politicians, and celebrities,
who got to bathe in the reflected moral stature of Mandela.

1]
In fact, the Johannesburg advocacy group DeafSA pointed out that
the fraudster's mimicry bore no relation to actual sign language- in
other words, his acting out couldn't pass as a credible imitation for
five seconds. Yet this guy was given security clearance and a pass to
stand on the stage near the various “world leaders” speechifying
for the alleged edification of the global masses and perform his
insulting pantomime.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

There was a tawdry reminder of the ANC's lack of qualifications to govern at the farewell ceremony for the just-deceased Nelson Mandela. The "sign language interpreter" on stage for the benefit of deaf spectators was nothing of the sort. He was a fraud, a sleazebag who made meaningless hand gestures pretending to be signing. Apparently this asshole just wanted to get his worthless ass on the stage as a cheap ego trip for himself. Pretty unbelievable that such a thing could occur. Mandela's death is probably the most significant event in South Africa since he stepped down from the presidency.

You'd think that the government could at least have basic competence when staging a major farewell ceremony for Nelson Mandela. Political bosses from around the world, including the president of the super-duper power, the U.S., and three of his predecessors, were on hand.

But the ANC's current bosses are too corrupt, venal, and amoral to be embarrassed. Like all too many African rulers in the post-colonial period, they are nothing but racketeers posing as legitimate politicians and even "statesmen." It's a sad and despicable betrayal of the hopes of millions of those they now misrule.

The ANC's achievements to date include doubling the number of people
living on a dollar a day, and massacreing striking mine workers,
apartheid-regime-style, and then lying about it. (An atrocity now
forgotten in Western media.)

The ANC's poobahs of course have made a huge production out of Mandela's demise, selfishly milking it for all the reflected political glory on themselves they can. Considering what political pygmies they are in comparison to Mandela, this is especially disgusting. The current president, Jacob Zuma, is so loathed that he was actually booed while speaking at the event, despite the reverence the people have for Mandela. Zuma is a rapist and polygamist who fancies himself a superstud, and worthless at governing, except to enrich himself to the tune of millions. His latest scandal is a huge expenditure of government funds installing luxuries at his private home. His predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, a venal hack, is most notable for denying that HIV is the cause of AIDS and promoting quack "theories" and "cures" for the disease. Speaking of which, Zuma thinks he inoculated himself from the disease by showering after sex.

Other self-serving parasites at the Mandela memorial were various global "celebrities" and "world leaders" (political bosses past and present) on hand for a bit of political necrophilia to bathe themselves in the waters of Mandela's moral authority, now that they all agree he was Great. (This is a recent position for the U.S., which didn't get around to taking him off its "terrorist" list until 2008. Oh, and it was the CIA that enabled the apartheid regime to arrest him in 1962, giving the regime's secret police his whereabouts and description. But don't tell anyone- apparently that's supposed to be a secret, given the U.S. media and politicians' refusal to acknowledge the fact.)

They aren't there to "honor" Mandela. They're there to promote themselves, most of them. This spectacle of self-regard is called "the World Says Farewell To Mandela" by the New York Times, the Newspaper of Record for the American haute bourgeoisie.

One of the few who has a right to be there, is Raul Castro. Cuba actually supported the struggle against apartheid, unlike the U.S. And Cuba sent troops to fight the South African apartheid army when it invaded Angola. (Guess which side the U.S. was on.) The excuse now is that it was "during the Cold War," which apparently justifies all. (Nowadays the "war on terror" justifies anything and everything the Masters of the World want to do.) Of course, U.S. reactionary politicians like Ted Cruz and Ileana Ross-Lehtinen threw fits because Obama politely shook Castro's hand on stage instead of being a rude lout at a memorial ceremony.

At least Mandela isn't here to see these shameless political necrophiliacs strutting about on "the world stage."

Friday, December 06, 2013

First, it must be said, that what was
unusual and outstanding about Nelson Mandela was his magnanimity
towards the white racist fascist scum that killed and maimed so many
people and caused such misery and oppression. At least, that's the
Official Truth nowadays. But perhaps Mandela was a super-cool
pragmatist, a man with ice water in his veins who could put aside
emotion and view a political situation in the utmost objectivity. Or
perhaps he was a cynical operator, who cut a deal enabling the
African National Congress to take power from the white racist Boers.
Those are also possible explanations, especially in view of his own
behavior as President and the selfishness and corruption of the ANC
in power. (By all accounts, the economic lot of the mass of black
people in South Africa has improved not at all since the overthrow of
white racist rule.) We should take with a grain of salt the hosannas
of Western media and politicians for the man. If they love him so
much, there must be a bad reason.

But let us put such speculations aside
for the moment. What has the Western capitalists singing his praises
are two main things, one visible and one hidden. The visible reason
was the deal Mandela and the ANC struck with the apartheid regime
letting them get away with their decades of crimes, which included
many acts of murder, torture, and brutality. (Even after Mandela was
released from prison in 1990, the apartheid secret police sent a
letter bomb to a white priest working against the regime, blowing off
both his hands and an eye.)

The covert reason is that Mandela
immediately sided with the big capitalists against the class
interests of the poor black majority. I will provide more details in
a later essay.

Yet it's fair to see Mandela as a great
leader. His stature looms especially large since such is the pathetic
state of that species that flatters itself by calling itself
“humanity” that great leaders are so rare.

Most of the people designated “leaders”
are nothing of the kind. They are rulers, or governors. Politicians
and strongmen. Mandela was a genuine leader, a man who inspired
others to follow him and admire him.

The word “leader” has even been
appropriated by the capitalists to replace “boss.” “Boss” now
is only used to refer to union officials, as in “union bosses” or
“labor bosses.” Read business and company news- you cannot find
the word “boss” in reference to actual bosses. They're all
“leaders.” Thus is meaning and understanding systematically
destroyed by the vandalism of language. Consciousness itself is thus
falsified on a mass scale.

So when someone actually is a leader,
the contrast makes him appear superhuman.

Now, as to the current bourgeois media
and politicians genuflecting to the Man now that he is dead:

Using Half Truths to Lie. We
have been treated to yet another example of this common propaganda
trick of the bourgeois media. In their incessant reiterations of the
fact that Mandela was “imprisoned for 27 years,” a key fact is
omitted. Namely, that he was imprisoned for 27 years because THE U.S.
CIA TOLD THE SOUTH AFRICAN SECRET POLICE WHERE TO FIND HIM. When you
mention that fact, you have a very different impression, a
very different picture of reality. Namely the true,accurate,
and objective reality, not the cynical, self-serving propaganda
version.

Another inconvenient fact which throws
the loud praise for the deceased in quite a different light is that
Mandela was officially listed by the U.S. Government as a
“terrorist” until 2008. Recall that Mandela was freed from
prison in 1990, and was elected president of South African in 1994!
So of course this rather awkward fact must be erased from memory, and
thus it goes unmentioned entirely by the capitalist media without
exception. (At least that I have noticed.)

Another
inconvenient fact of history, which thus must be suppressed, is that
the Boers had the help, until the last few years of their evil
rule, of the United States, especially the fascist Reagan regime, and
of European powers like “Great” Britain, a loathsome little
island whose elite-at least the reactionary section of it- still
pines for its lost empire. (They get to be vicarious imperialists by
riding on the U.S.' shoulder, like a parrot on a pirate, in its
various misbegotten “adventures” such as in Iraq and
Afghanistan.) Reagan even vetoed a law passed by Congress imposing
sanctions on the horrid apartheid regime (Congress then voted to
override the veto.) It was only because of popular political pressure
and protest in the U.S. that Congress was forced to act.

I would also like to remind you of a
person who once existed, a very brave man, who unlike Mandela
receives no lavish praise from the U.S. press- Steven Biko. Biko was
also a foe of apartheid, indeed one of the outstanding anti-apartheid
activists of the time. At the age of 30, he was arrested, beaten
savagely and torture for 22 hours, then thrown, naked, manacled, and
comatose, into the back of a truck for a 100 km drive to another
prison, where he shortly died from brain injuries. The fascist
racists regime that murdered him then put out the grotesquely cynical
story that he had killed himself by hunger striking. Some of his
writings were posthumously published under the title I Write What
I Like.

Biko goes unremembered in the West. Or
rather, his memory is suppressed by the same bourgeois propaganda
system that cynically hails Nelson Mandela now. As I have described,
there's a lot they “don't remember.”

Friday, November 15, 2013

Probably. Congress has a bill in the
works to heap yet more punitive economic sanctions on Iran (in
practice, on the Iranian people, since they are the ones who suffer-
already Iranians are dying of cancer thanks to the U.S.-led economic
warfare, which has resulted in shortages of medicines). Obama has had
to plead with Congress- a humiliating position for the U.S.
president- to hold off on them so as not to kill the ongoing
negotiations between the five permanent members of the UN Security
Council [1] and Germany on the one side, and Iran on the
other, for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Secretary of
State John Kerry was dispatched to Congress to try and cajole them
not to sabotage the talks. (Kerry also had to scurry to Israel, the
U.S.' apparent boss, to make the case for the negotiations, including
in “briefings” for Israeli journalists from which American
journalists were excluded, an amazing incident which elicited barely
a mention from the American media, always protective of Israel and
thus needing to obfuscate its pampered status from the American
public's view.)

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin (the
correct spelling, not “Benjamin,” as U.S. media habitually
misrepresent it) Netanyahu brushed aside an International Atomic
Energy Agency report that says Iran has slowed its nuclear activities
for the last three months as irrelevant because Iran “already
possesses the necessary infrastructure for building a nuclear
weapon.” [2] That's probably true, more or less. Which
doesn't mean Iran is going to build
nuclear weapons. It DOES mean that if Israel and/or the U.S. attack
Iran, Iran COULD build them. Basically the U.S. and Israel insist on
the freedom to bomb Iran, assassinate its scientists and officials,
sponsor terrorism against Iran, and continue to try and overthrow the
regime. This freedom would be impaired if Iran were to build a
nuclear arsenal, as it would constraint U.S. and Israeli attacks on
Iran to some degree, if only because those two aggressor states would
feel more cautious. (And of course the surest way to provoke Iran to
making nuclear weapons would be to bomb the country- an irony lost on
the bullet-brained Netanyahu and American militarists.)

What Netanyahu wants is a totally
dismantling of all Iranian nuclear capabilities, peaceful or
not, closely monitored or not. His preferred route to that goal is
the usual Israeli way- by violence, in this case by bombing. (They've
also assassinated Iranian scientists and blown stuff up in Iran.)

Taking his cue from the Israeli head of
state, not the American one, GOP Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois said
of Kerry's briefing to Senators like him: “The pitch was very
unconvincing. It was fairly anti-Israeli.” [3]

Anti-Israeli. Right. Kerry probably
called for the destruction of Israel or something.

Kirk's demented, extremist attitude was
treated as unremarkable by the U.S. media and its resident
commentariat. This is symptomatic of the capture of the U.S. elites
by the State of Israel, mainly via its fifth column in the U.S.

To fully describe the long history of
the U.S. Congress' sycophantic obeisance to the State of Israel would
fill a book. For now, I'd like to just toss out three possible
motives behind a jackass like Mark Kirk making such an asinine
statement, one showing contempt for the Secretary of State of his own
nation.

The power of the organized Israeli
lobby in the U.S., including media power and money power.

Ideological affinity, which for
right-wingers like Kirk means admiring repressive regimes as long as
they aren't “socialist.” (“Liberals” have a different,
somewhat deluded, ideological affinity.)

Religious fanaticism of the
“Christian” variety. The Christians' “Bible” is a
Jewish-written tome which mostly deals with glorifying the ancient
Hebrews and their genocidal conquests. (Odd that Christians hated
Jews for a couple of millennia- some still do, of course.)

Israeli “aid” to the U.S.,
such as providing crucial military and “security” assistance to
the apartheid regime of South Africa, to the Somoza dictatorship of
Nicaragua, to the Guatemalan fascist regime, to the Argentine junta,
and so on, at moments when it would have been politically awkward
for the U.S. to do so.

So Obama and Kerry's fawning to the
Israelis and their puppet American Congresspeople is barely holding
the line against the attempt to suffocate the infant negotiations in
its cradle. Should even more sanctions be enacted against Iran now,
the Iranian hardliners will have additional leverage to force the new
Prime Minister of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, to abandon his “moderate”
(or “cunning,” as Netanyahu et al see it) path of
compromise. Of course, compromise is the last thing the “hawks”
want. They want Iran's total surrender, or the violent destruction of
its nuclear program. Just as during the cold war, their kind (some of
the same people in many cases) viewed detente as near treason (or as
actual treason, for which they made JFK pay with some bullets fired
from a grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, in 1963). For them, “there is
no substitute for victory.” Every conflict is all-out war for these
demons and calls for total destruction of the Enemy.

One last note for the benefits of
simpletons with a manichean world view. I'm not “on Iran's side.”
Iran is ruled by oppressive theocrats who are guilty of numerous
human rights violations against Iranians. They support the Assad
dictatorship in Syria, one of the world's worst. They are allied with
religious fanatics Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. I hope
some day the Iranian people can rid themselves of these creeps who
hijacked the Iranian revolution of 1979, much as Lenin and his gang
took advantage of the fall of the Tsar in 1917 Russia to install
themselves in power.

On the other side, Israel has been a
constant violator of human rights since its founding in 1948. Their
current allies of convenience against Iran, Saudi Arabia and its
satellite oil sheikdoms of the Arabian peninsula, are all very
repressive countries. Saudi Arabia in fact is much more repressive
than Iran is, enforced by religious “police.” Only a few years
ago these “police” forced schoolgirls to be burned to death in a
school fire because the girls didn't have their hair covered as they
were trying to escape the flames, for one example. And the regime
executed people by beheading, Taliban/Al Qaeda style. For that
matter, the Saudis were accomplices in the 9/11 attacks that the U.S.
has used as pretext for a new era of U.S. aggression around the world
and a systematic attack on human rights. Today Saudis fund jihadist
terrorists in Syria who fight not just Assad's forces but the
indigenous Syrian rebels. The Saudis Gulf satellite states are also
awful. For example Bahrain's rulers have been oppressing the majority
of the population there for years.

Then there is the U.S., a nation
founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, a nation that
has waged expansionist wars over the years against both of its
contiguous neighbors (1812 against present-day Canada, which didn't
work out so well for them, and 1848 against Mexico, in which the U.S.
scored fully half of Mexico's national territory, which it absorbed)
and farther afield too, as when it seized Spain's “possessions”
including the Philippines, half a world away. In its ruthless
history, the U.S. has killed millions of civilians and installed or
backed military/fascist dictatorships in scores of countries.

The bottom line is, this is no Good
Guys vs. Bad Guys situation. There are only Bad Guys here. Far too
many seemingly intelligent people (not to mention the simple-minded
majority) go astray either because of their ideological devotion
(which trumps fealty to facts and reality) or to intellectual and
moral laziness, and take simplistic kneejerk positions on one side or
the other. There is also the innate tendency of people to self-align
with power, like little iron filings in a magnetic field.

Objectivity is the duty of the morally
and intellectually honest human. In this case objectivity leads us to
conclude that all these nations are basically bags of shit worthy of
condemnation. Within that reality, we can hope for less harmful
outcomes. In this case the desired outcome for humans isn't clear. On
the one hand the fewer nuclear weapons and nuclear armed states in
the world, the better for humanity, as a general principle. On the
other hand, A nuclear armed Iran would be a counterweight to the
oppressive power of the U.S., Israel, and the loathsome
Wahhabi-spreading Saudis. (Wahhabism is a mental disease that leads
to terrorism.) Just as the Soviet Union had the virtue of being a
counterweight and check on the U.S., even though it itself was evil
and oppressive, so Iran to a smaller degree could be. Which doesn't
make Iran “good.” All it means is that the world, and life, is
complex, a fact that people evade with simplistic, ideological
thinking.

1] The five permanent members of
the UN Security Council, designated “victors” in World War II
(even though two of them were occupied by the Axis powers, and one,
France, having been totally defeated and occupied, and numerous other
nations on the Allied side did not get a permanent, cushy seat
on the Council that comes with a veto) are the U.S., Britain, France,
China, and Russia (which inherited the Soviet Union's seat). China
took Taiwan's place when Taiwan could no longer pretend to be
“China,” as it had done with U.S. power behind it.

Saturday, November 02, 2013

A few days ago, the Pakistani military
issued a bogus number for civilians killed by U.S. drones in
Pakistan- 67. This figure defies credulity, contradicts all the
counts by reputable international human rights organizations and
media tabulations, and most significantly, contradicts the toll given
by the official Pakistani government. [1] This
as the Pakistani “prime minister,” Nawaz Sharif, met Obama in
Washington to gripe about drone strikes, which he claims to oppose.
[2]

And now the U.S. just bumped off the current boss of the Pakistani
Taliban (terrorist cousins of the Afghan Taliban who wrecked
Afghanistan when they ruled it and have been given sanctuary by their
Pakistani military backers to launch terrorist attacks on Afghanistan
since they were chased out of power by the U.S. and Northern Alliance
in 2001), Hakimullah Mehsud.

Before continuing, let me say that no
human being should shed a tear for this loathsome fanatic's demise.
He insisted on imposing crushing, dehumanizing, lifelong repression
on everyone in Pakistan, especially on females, using mass murder in
the form of bombings of civilians and other acts of terror to compel
compliance with his demented demands. He represented the
anti-humanism of a barbaric Islamic sect. [3]

What's interesting politically here is
that Mehsud was knocked off by a U.S. drone (and it's a good guess
that the Pakistani military supplied info on his whereabouts to the
U.S. in order to enable this assassination- Pakistani military intel
confirmed the successful hit, as did Mehsud's Taliban henchmen) at
the very moment the nominal civilian government of Pakistan was
embarking on negotiations with this terrorist hoodlum, with a
delegation on their way to meet with Mehsud. So within just a few
days the real power in Pakistan, the military, undercut and sabotaged
the putative (civilian) government twice, first with the bogus
lowball number of civilian drone deaths, and now with this. The Paki
Interior Minister even described the U.S. assassination as a
calculated blow on the now-stillborn attempt to initiate a peace
process.

The effect of the hit was akin to
throwing a rock at a hornet's nest. “Our revenge will be
unprecedented!” howled Taliban terrorist commander “Abu Omar.”
He blamed the “fully complicit” Paki government: “We know our
enemy very well.” Pakistanis braced themselves for the bloody
vengeance to come. A RAND corporation specialist saw such a result as
likely. (RAND stands for Research And Development. A so-called “think
tank,” it was set up originally by the U.S. Air Force as a nest for
military-industrial complex plotters and “analysts.” Among other
things, it generates “research” used to justify prying
ever-larger sums of money out of Congress to shovel into the
insatiable maw of the military and its associated parasitic
corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Grumman, and
numerous others.)

Paki “officials” said CIA drones
fired four or more missiles at the target in a small village in North
Waziristan, the effectively-autonomous region of Pakistan that has
been de facto ceded to the terrorists. Their detailed
knowledge points to close collaboration on the hit. [4]

The CIA relied on
one of their bedrock principles: “payback's a bitch.” Mehsud's
group is blamed for the suicide bomber who killed 7 CIA employees in
Afghanistan in 2009. The CIA was duped into believing that the bomber
was an informer they have recruited to infiltrate the terrorists.
Outfoxed at their own game of duplicity, the CIA thirsted for
revenge, getting the U.S. government to put a $5 million bounty on
Mehsud's head. The CIA has been gunning for Mehsud ever since.

Of course the CIA
won't be paying the price for the latest killing of a Mehsud.
Pakistani civilians will. The Paki Taliban will be delivering the
bill, denominated in blood, to hapless and helpless Pakistanis who
are bystanders in their own country.

So in just a
couple of weeks, the U.S. has sabotage two governments'
attempts to deal with the Pakistan Taliban in their own way. Before
the Mehsud hit, the U.S. military waylaid a convoy of Afghan
intelligence officers in Afghanistan and kidnapped a Pakistan
Taliban representative they were escorting. The Afghans had a plan to
provide aid to the Paki Taliban as a counterweight to Pakistani
support for the Afghan Taliban, to retaliate for Paki-sponsored
terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, and to have
a bargaining chip to get the Pakis to back off their support for
Afghan Talibs. Thus does the U.S. undercut other governments,
exposing them as impotent in their own countries. In the Afghan case,
the Afghan regime was totally humiliated: imagine a foreign military
squad intercepting an FBI convoy and seizing someone they're
escorting, inside the U.S. Thus the arrogance of the self-proclaimed
“indispensable nation.” Thanks, Uncle Indispensable. [5]

Of course, the Pak
military also undercut the nominal Paki government, killing the
attempt at negotiations. So the military doesn't want a
rapproachement with the “militants.” The timing of the
killing makes this seemingly obvious. Yet it won't go in and fight
them. Once again, they are playing a twisted, sick, immoral game.
Playing with fire seems to be their favorite pastime. Perhaps they
feel a high level of domestic terrorism is in their interest. Perhaps
they figure it discredits the civilian government. Perhaps they are
planning on playing the “saving the nation”card and overthrowing
the nominal government at some point, as they have done before (and
as all military coupists everyway and always do, pretending to be
rescuing the nation they are enslaving).

Whether any true peace could have come
about from negotiations by the Pak government with their indigenous
terrorists is highly debatable. In the past, deals have been cut with
these cutthroats, only to be immediately dishonored by the
terrorists. The attempts by the Pakistani establishment to appease
the monster created by the Pak military have all proved futile.
Instead the terrorists launched aggressive military offensives to
take over more territory, and in the last few years have used bombs
to slaughter thousands of Pakistani civilians. I have in the past
noted the parallels between the Islamofascists and the European
fascists of the World War Two era. Some similarities are utter
untrustworthiness, utter ruthlessness, extreme violence, an
uncompromising attitude towards achieving their desired ends, and a
record of breaking deals whenever it suits them. But that does not
give the Pak military and the U.S. the right to sabotage the attempt
by the legal government of Pakistan to deal with its internal problem
in its own way. [See: “Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?”]

Then again, the U.S. is delusional if
it thinks that just by killing each replacement leader of a
particular gang of terrorists, they are winning. If ten Chairmen of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a row were each killed, would the U.S.
military collapse? If ten FBI or CIA directors in a row were taken
out with bombs, would the FBI and CIA cease to exist? Get my point?
These are not small organizations that can be eliminated with
assassinations. These are broad-based movements with millions of
sympathizers around the world, which provide a deep well from which
to recruit. [6]

Let's look at the scorecard: the U.S.
has assassinated thousands of putative terrorists, including most of
the main leaders, even Osama bin Laden, the arch-villain in the U.S.
propaganda narrative. And what has the result been? The terrorists
are waxing powerful in Pakistan. They are growing ever-stronger in
Iraq, openly building training camps and bases in the western part of
the country and setting off terror bombs almost daily. They are
becoming increasingly active in the Syrian civil war. They recently
look over half of Mali, and were about to take over the other half,
requiring a French invasion to push them back into the desert, where
they survive. Northern Nigeria is an ungoverned land of terror thanks
to Boko Haram and the murderous and ineffective Nigerian army.
Al-Shabab is seemingly ineradicable in Somalia, from where they just
launched a headline-grabbing assault on the main shopping mall in
Kenya (and repulsed a U.S. Navy SEAL retaliation raid a few weeks
ago). In Yemen U.S. missile strikes on villagers have created more
recruits for the local franchise of Al-Qaeda. The Wahhabi ideology is
spreading in the Far East, in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the former
U.S. colony of the Philippines. It seems that the U.S. is barely
holding the jihadist movement at bay, and may even be strategically
losing. Drones may be necessary in the fight, but they are clearly
not sufficient, not for victory, and maybe not even for a stalemate.

1] The official Paki government
is really just a nominal government. It provides virtually no
services to the population, and has historically been a vehicle for
the corrupt Paki civilian elite to enrich itself. Past presidents and
prime ministers of Pakistan were infamous for massive self-enrichment
as they engorged themselves like giant leeches sucking at the body
politic while in office. The real government is the deep state that
consist of the military and its secret police/terrorism arm, the
so-called “Inter Services Intelligence,” universally abbreviated
in U.S. media as ISI. Pakistan has been a military dictatorship or
oligarchy since its founding, sometimes using corrupt civilian
governments as a beard to hide behind, sometimes dispensing with the
disguise entirely.

2] Sharif may really oppose the
drone attacks on his country. But it's irrelevant, because the
nominal civilian government of Pakistan does not even control the
Pakistani military and cannot issue orders to it. The Pakistani
military is a state within a (sham) state.

3] On the other hand, a foreign
government firing missiles into a sovereign country to kill a
criminal and political gangster is hardly desirable. The right way to
do it would be for the government of that country to assert control
over its own territory, apprehend the criminal, and put him on trial.
(A real trial, not a show trial.) Then, if he is convicted, in
this case to execute him. The way things are, we have the U.S.
killing hundreds of civilians in the course of killing a couple of
thousands of presumed jihadists. And the U.S. military and secret
police decide who is “guilty” and act as judge, jury, and
executioner. This is what Eric Holder Jr., the top legal officer of
the U.S., insists is “due process” under the U.S. Constitution.
No U.S. court objects to this. Thus is the U.S. Constitution and the
U.S.' alleged love of rights revealed yet again, as it has been over
and over in U.S. history, to be a sham.

However, as a practical matter this is
a “dirty war.” The Pakistanis will not or can not control their
own territory at this point- perhaps the Frankenstein's Monster
created by the ISI has grown too extensively, the cancer spread too
far, for that. Besides, the Paki military would rather dream about
war with India instead of dealing decisively with the genuine threat
to Pakistan, the menace within that the military itself created and
nurtured.

We could go into the fact that the U.S.
itself fundamentally created this problem of jihad, along with its
buddies the Saudis and the Pakistani military (erstwhile buddies in
the latter case) when it decided to back the most primitive religious
revanchists during the Soviet attempt to impose a semi-modern client
regime in Afghanistan. But that's a whole other essay, and is ground
that others have tilled already. (The CIA shorthand for the negative
boomerang effect of U.S. actions is “blowback.”) It should be
common knowledge by now how the U.S. watered the noxious weed of
jihadism with money, weapons, and training, yet Americans manage to
pretend not to know it. Anyone who tries to mention it is intimidated
by the insinuation of being “pro-terrorist.” Just as anyone who
tries to talk about how Israel has the U.S. establishment by the
testicles is called “anti-Semitic,” a very effective silencing
technique which causes people to censor themselves, making the task
of the self-appointed political-ideological commissars all the
easier. Indeed, their task of policing the public sphere would be
impossible without the complicity of all those who self-censor.

4] “U.S. Drones Said to Kill Leader of Pakistani Taliban, Dealing Militants Major Blow,” New
YorkTimes, November 2, 2013, p. A13. “One Pakistani
official, citing intelligence reports,” also informed the NYT
that Mehsud's uncle and a bodyguard were killed with Mehsud, as was
Mehsud's deputy, Abdullah “I Love Beheadings!” Behar, plus two
others were wounded. Pretty detailed information, I'd say. So it
seems the CIA isn't the only American organization with close
ties to Paki “intel.”

The NYT says that Behar took the
place of Latif Mehsud, the commander who was just kidnapped from the
Afghans by the U.S. (The NYT, in the aforementioned articles,
opaquely refers to the kidnapping this way: “Latif Mehsud...who was
detained [SIC] by American forces in Afghanistan last month.”
No mention hint that he was seized from the Afghans.

And true to form, the Obama regime once
again acted with irritating coyness, as it so often does. White House
mouthpiece Caitlin M. Hayden put out a statement claiming the Obama
regime was in no position “to confirm reports of Mr. Mahsud's
death,” in the NYT's words. But the Times got “two
[ANONYMOUS] American defense officials with knowledge of the strike”
to confirm that their prey was enjoying his virgins in paradise.

5] It's worth mentioning that
the big recent pusher of the “indispensable nation” conceit is
one Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under William Jefferson
Clinton, who said, when confronted by Leslie Stahl on CBS' 60
Minutes TV program about half a million Iraqi children dying
because of Clinton's murderous sanctions on Iraq and asked “was it
worth it” by Stahl, responded, after some orotund smoke-blowing,
“We think it was worth it.” What exactly was gained in return for
killing 500,000 Iraqi children wasn't explained. Remember, the U.S.
didn't manage to overthrow Saddam Hussein until the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion of 2003. Stahl, at least in what was
broadcast by CBS, didn't follow up on Albright's shockingly callous
and cold-blooded reply. Albright evinced not the slightest discomfort
at the question and uttered her reply with complete self-assurance
and authority. This woman, who ironically descends from Jewish
background, could have been an apparatchik in Hitler's Final Solution
with that attitude.

6] Now, the fact that millions
are potential jihadi recruits might sound like justification
for massive NSA spying on the world's population- including all
Americans who use a phone or access the Internet. Well it might be,
if the U.S. government were willing to admit that there are millions
of terrorist sympathizers out there. But for political and
ideological reasons they are petrified to say that. It makes it plain
that their “war on terror” is an endless tunnel with no light at
the end. It also shows them up as deceivers who have presented the
enemy as small bands of fanatics, not fish swimming in a sea of
millions of ideologically-attuned populations. And it makes the
current strategy of limited military and violent CIA actions appear
hopeless inadequate, indeed Sisyphean, to the task of eliminating the
jihadist crusade.

In fact, there is good evidence that
trying to stamp out terrorism aimed at the U.S. by drone
assassinations in distant lands causes such terrorism. Right
after the U.S. assassinated Hakimullah Mehsud's predecessor,
Baitullah Mehsud, the group tried to detonate a car bomb in Times
Square, in the heart of Manhattan. (And see how well the decapitation
strategy is working to eliminate these organizations? Haircut
strategy would be a better analogy. Just keep cutting the hair as it
keeps growing back.) Luckily the bomb was a dud. Bystanders spotted
it and alerted police- yet another example of the superfluousness of
the police state in protecting against terrorism. (The NSA had the
gall to take credit for foiling the Times Square bombing attempt.
What shameless liars. Yet U.S. media still dutifully transmits their
lies to the public as if they had any credibility whatsoever.) The
same thing happened with the “underwear bomber,” whose father
alerted U.S. officials to his radicalization, who bought a one-way
ticket and flew without luggage, yet had no trouble boarding a plane
to the U.S. (Unlike dissidents, Green party members, and other
political victims put on the No-Fly list by the vindictive FBI and
other repressive organs.) Passengers on the plane stopped this
Nigerian jackass from detonating his crotch on the plane. And none of
the 9,000 soldiers and cops hunting the surviving Boston Marathon
bomber found him- a homeowner did.

Of course, the “counterterrorism”
careerists love such events as the Times Square dud car bomb,
as it provides a booster shot of Terror Scare propaganda to keep the
public going along with the never-ending War On Terror, which keeps
the money and power flowing to the professional secret policemen and
hitmen of the massive U.S. “security” apparatus. There is a
symbiotic relationship between the jihadists and the U.S. “security”
establishment. The blows each strikes against the other side provides
grist for their respective propaganda mills and reinvigorates their
violent crusades.

Another reason the justification
would be invalid is the fact that the military and secret
policemen of the U.S. deep state, while claiming to only be
protecting all us poor helpless damsels in distress from the big bad
scary terrorists, in fact use their ever-increasing power to repress
dissent. These people and organizations have a century-long history
now of massive surveillance of American progressives, dissidents, and
“uppity” blacks who refused to accept their status as “niggers,”
that is, as subhumans subject to random violence, murder,
exploitation, and every kind of personal humiliation and denial of
jobs, services, fairness, even seats on buses. We have just seen them
murder the journalist Michael Hastings. They helped smother the
Occupy Movement, that challenged the corporate and financial
oligarchy. They systematically use their surveillance to gather and
them launder “evidence” used against people. These people cannot
be trusted with such power. They know that Islamic terrorism is no
fundamental threat to their system. In fact, periodic attacks serve
their interests, by justifying their relentless grabbing of more and
more repressive power inside America, with the acquiescence of a
population conditioned to be frightened and submissive to being
treated more and more like a prison population.

In addition, Congress has given them
carte blanche, with sham “oversight,” willingly kept in
the dark by the repressive deep state, and “judicial review”
consists of a secret “court” that rubber-stamps all the warrant
requests of the surveillance apparatus, a mere paperwork exercise.

In fundamental ways there isn't much
new here. The same deep state took out the president of the U.S.,
their nominal commander, in 1963 when they disapproved of his
policies.

Monday, October 07, 2013

The
American media and government are ballyhooing the kidnapping of a guy
they claim “masterminded” the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and
Tanzania, Africa, in 1998. The Libyan government wasn’t told. There
was no extradition request. A gang of U.S. commandos, FBI agents, and
CIA officers swooped down in the middle of Tripoli, Libya, and
grabbed a Libyan off the street by the name of Nazih Abdul-Hamed
al-Ruqai, now known as Abu Anas al-Liby. (You’ve heard of him, I’m
sure. The FBI was dangling a reward of $5 million for turning him in,
so you probably had your eye out for him.) [1]

Gee, I wonder if the U.S. would mind if
a Libyan commando squad grabbed an American off the streets of
Washington, D.C. and spirited him away to a secret torture cell? (For
now, apparently a Navy brig on a ship in the Mediterranean.) [This
occurred on October 5th, the same day another U.S. mission
didn’t go as well. See “Invincible U.S. Navy SEALs Repulsed ByAl-Shabab.”]

Yet
another U.S. violation of another nation’s sovereignty- and thus of
international law, the body of law the U.S. so thunderously invokes
when condemning enemy nations. So what’s new? The U.S. overthrows
governments it doesn’t like. It assassinates presidents. (The U.S.
state-within-a-state even assassinated the American president
in 1963.) It sabotages economies, poisons crops, spreads diseases.
[2]

U.S. Secretary of
State John “Swiftboat” Kerry brayed “He can run, but he can’t
hide,” cribbing a hoary line of boxers’ trash talk.

Can’t hide? How
come you couldn’t get him for 15 years? Sure he can hide- just not
indefinitely.

Besides, he wasn’t
even hiding, but living openly now. Apparently he got complacent and
overconfident. Guess he forgot the warning, Don’t Mess With The
U.S. They don’t forget. They
hunt down AWOL American soldiers DECADES later, as they recently did
with one in Spain. (The Spanish told the U.S. to shove off, he’s a
Spanish citizen now.) There are other cases, such as in Sweden. The
FBI is still trying to find the bones of airline hijacker D.B.
Cooper,
who parachuted out of the jet with a suitcase full of ransom money in
1971. The government is still
picking at the scab of the 3 prisoners who escaped Alcatraz
in 1962
in a homemade rubber raft, trying to determine definitively if they
made it to shore or drowned. Later
it emerged that a raft was found on an island and a car stolen in the
vicinity. The U.S. Marshall’s service is going to investigate until
the escapees’ 100th
birthdays. (How’s that
for Javert-like
fanaticism?)

The power-mad can’t stand it when someone escapes their clutches.

Of course, the U.S. decided it couldn’t trust the Libyans not to
tip off their prey, same as they couldn’t trust the Pakistanis when
they sent the SEALs to assassinate bin Laden.

But it’s not as if the U.S. hasn’t seized anyone involved in the
embassy bombings. Is slacking the thirst for revenge worth trampling
on international law and cordial relations with other nations? (I
guess so.)

According to the
New York Times, al-Liby’s seizure ends a 15-year manhunt-
i.e. one starting in 1998. And they said he was indicted in New York
in 2000. (“U.S. Commando Raids Hit Terror Targets in 2 Nations,”
Sunday, October 6, 2013, p.1.)

So- what right did
they have to hunt him in the two years prior to his indictment? And
what were they trying to do in those two years- assassinate him? (The
U.S. media keeps referring to U.S. Military seizures of people as
“arrests.” Soldiers aren’t police, so they can’t “arrest”
anyone. The use of the word “arrest” is to legitimize
illegitimate seizures, since the U.S. refuses to call its military
prisoners prisoners of war- even though they claim to be in a “war
on terrorism.”)

1998 was a year of
the Clinton Reign. Clinton initiated the current practice of secret
kidnappings and hiding prisoners in torture cells outside the U.S.-
aka “rendition.” But illegal kidnapping goes even farther back in
U.S. history; for example, “atomic spy” Morton Sobell was
kidnapped from Mexico by FBI agents and dragged to the U.S. for
show-trial.

The
U.S. has issued its usual opaque and vaguely ominous statement that
their prey is being held “in a secure location” outside Libya.
That is,
he’s in their clutches, (probably
on a ship in he Mediterranean), and
being subjected to Torture Lite (since they plan on staging a show
trial in New York for him, they’re
going easy on him). And
he has no right to remain silent and no right to an attorney, in the
weeks (or months) before
they finally haul him into a U.S. Courtroom
for faux due process.

They’ll
say he “waived” his “rights,” of course. Why wouldn’t
a hardened terrorist, a fanatical enemy of the U.S., voluntarily
waive his rights and willingly
tell his enemy interrogators everything they want to know? Perfectly
plausible! And stop that chatter about “human rights!” This is no
human being, this is a “terrorist.” Same as anti-war activists,
environmentalists, and the Occupy Movement are! Just ask the FBI! And
Thanks to Barack Hussein Obama, Carl Levin, and the U.S. Congress,
they are subject to indefinite imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay or any
other military dungeon in the global U.S. gulag at the whim of the
president of the U.S. under
U.S. Law. But that’s OK! Because it’s legal! Just like Nazi
persecution of Jews was legal- under duly enacted Nazi law.

The
point is, don’t ever confuse legal
with legitimate,
moral,
or just.

Hey, if a guy
commits a crime in Kenya, and Tanzania, shouldn’t he be tried in
Kenya and Tanzania? Oh never mind, when one country rules the world,
that country’s law applies everywhere. [3]

The boilerplate
U.S. statement after the kidnapping also said, rather defensively and
apparently to preempt objections, that it was “legal.” I suppose
that’s because, as Nixon said, “when the President does it, it’s
legal.” Which in turn is merely following the legal precedent set
earlier by the Third Reich, the Fuhrerprinziple, which stated that
the word of Adolf Hitler was law, according to German legal experts.
That’s the same kind of legal expertise that serves power as
demonstrated during the regime of Bush the Younger by John Yoo, James
Bybee, and Alberto Gonzales.

A few words are in
order here about those embassy bombings. About two hundred African
passersby were killed, and around a thousand wounded, some maimed for
life. Eight American government personnel were killed. That’s a
huge amount of “collateral damage” for a mainly symbolic attack.
It demonstrates the contempt for human life that al-Qaeda has, and
the ruthlessness and monomaniacalness with which it pursues its
goals. And of course its ultimate ends- to impose a hyper-repressive,
hyper misogynist and male supremacist social order on unwilling
people, and to rule in totalitarian fashion- is evil, anti-human. So
I don’t have sympathy for the al-Qaeda members and their ilk per
se. What is alarming is the superpower U.S. systematically
destroying human rights. Because those rights are indivisible. Either
everyone has them, or no one has them. All that is left is privileges
for the shrinking number of the
favored few. The
privilege of not being tortured, of having a lawyer, of having
a genuine trial, of not being convicted based on secret “evidence,”
and so forth. Privileges can be taken away at the whim of those in
power. And as we see, anyone the repressive U.S. government and its
numerous reactionary secret police agencies and military don’t like
can be branded “terrorist” (the replacement for the older
demonizing words “communist,” and before 1917, “anarchist.”)

[1] Funny
thing about FBI “rewards” for mega-terrorists, those
luridly-presented comic-book-type super-villains. No one ever turns
any of them in to collect the rewards. The U.S. was teasing people
with a $20 million reward for Obama bin Laden, with no takers, and
there are other multi-million dollar “rewards” that no one seems
interested in claiming.

Just as well for
potential claimants. The U.S. wouldn’t bother protecting whoever
turned in the terrorists, so they’d likely be killed sooner or
later. And here’s a dirty secret about FBI rewards- they don’t
really pay them, certainly not in full.

2] All
done to Cuba, among other nations. I recall reading the boasts of a
professor who invented an oil for the CIA that instead of
lubricating, destroyed motors, wearing them out ten times faster than
normal, which was
infiltrated into Cuba and
used for sabotage.

3] But
it doesn’t work the other way. Other nations can’t try people for
crimes committed in the U.S., or snatch people off U.S. territory and
drag them back to their own dungeons. And people outside the U.S.
victimized by corporations can’t sue in U.S. courts,
generally. Ditto most victims of U.S.-backed torture regimes. The
U.S. has what is know as a Double Standard Heads We Win Tails You
Lose legal code. Glenn
Greenwald just wrote a book that naively stumbled across this fact,
With
Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality
and Protect the Powerful.Greenwald’s
focus is on the blatant class bias of the U.S. legal system, not the
political persecution of dissidents and various enemies.
The facts he lays out are
important enough that you should familiarize yourself with them.

Friday, October 04, 2013

During Greece's ongoing Great
Depression, induced by the irresponsibility, feckless mismanagement,
corruption and criminality of the Greek political elite, two
tried-and-true capitalist responses to economic crisis have arisen: a
resort to fascist violence, and scapegoating of victims of the
economic crisis as the culprits for that crisis. In Greece over the
last year and a half this has meant the emergence of the neo-Nazi
Golden Dawn fascist party, which has followed Hitler's playbook of
simultaneously employing two different and parallel routes to power:
vigilante street violence and participating in electoral politics.
The scapegoat of choice has been immigrants (rather than Jews).

Two weeks ago, Golden Dawn apparently
overplayed its hand. One of its goons stabbed to death a well-known
Greek anti-fascist hip-hop artist.[1]This
apparently struck a nerve in the country (unlike the fascist terror
group's long-running campaign of violence and intimidation against
non-European immigrants, and the spectacle of a Golden Dawn
legislator punching out two female left-wing parliamentarians
ontelevision).

Greek anti-terrorist police arrest head
of Golden Dawn and several others. The fascist terrorist
organization's boss was charged with forming a criminal organization.
Two senior members of the “security services” and several
high-ranking cops resign or are suspended because of their links to
the fascist terrorist Golden Dawn group.

Typically for fascists, one of Golden
Dawn’s arrested parliamentarians, Yiannis Lagos, is involved in
various criminal rackets, including prostitution, “protection”
(i.e. extortion under threat of violent assault), blackmail, and
money laundering, according to secret service documents leaked to the
Greek press. He placed a call to the G.D. Big Boss Nikos
Michaloliakos a half hour after the murder. (Strange, if what the
G.D. bosses are claiming is true, that the murderer wasn’t a Golden
Dawn member. By the way, the slayer claims G.D. membership and was
decked out in their regalia.

Golden
Dawn has18 members of Parliament (out of 300). The Greek Constitution
bars banning a political party. Hence the new designation of G.D. as
a criminal organization. [2]

Before
this murder, the Greek power establishment ignored the slaying by
Golden Dawn stormtrooper-types of two immigrants and beatings and
other attacks on another 250 (those are just the reported ones-
police backing of Golden Dawn no doubt discouraged many other victims
from going to the police, as well as fear of deportation). [3]

Well, Greece is still better than the
U.S. It doesn't matter how many doctors anti-abortion terrorists
murder or how many bombs they plant- there's never a crackdown on
their movement, their aiders and abetters and material supporters are
never prosecuted, or even jailed for refusing to testify before Grand
Juries (Grand Juries are never tasked with investigating them at
all). In the U.S., if a fascist killed a leftist, the leftist would
be called a suicide, or blamed for their own death- just as when the
FBI planted a bomb in the car of anti-logging activist Judi Bari, she
was charged with making and transporting the bomb that almost killed
her herself! (Eventually that frame-up fell apart, and the Oakland
Police, the FBI's co-conspirators, lost a civil suit brought by Bari.
But the deep state won in the end, as the CIA murdered Bari with
breast cancer.)

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Like
zombies in a horror movie, or Freddy Krueger in the “Nightmare on
Elm Street” movies, every time we're told that the Somali
Islamofascist group al-Shabab (“the Youth”) is on the ropes, they
suddenly lash out with maximum surprise, striking from the grave,
attacking the court building in Mogadishu (Somalia's capital) where
they killed two dozen people, hitting the UN, hotels, restaurants,
anywhere where people are trying to live normal lives. [1]

Now they did it again, more
spectacularly than ever, with the murderous assault on the Westgate
Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. An estimated 12-15 thugs jumped out of
vehicles and immediately started slaughtering shoppers and people
socializing. So far, the official death toll is over 60, with an
equal number missing and possibly killed, plus a couple hundred
wounded, ranging in age from 2 to 78. (Maybe “the Youth” should
change their Brand Name to “No Mercy!”)

The BBC carried a story based on an
interview with a witness who described a young child shot by the
terrorists, who then quizzed his sister and mother on some bit of
Muslim trivia. They answered correctly, and then the Shabab butchers
killed them anyway. When the boy screamed WHY?, they replied
that they objected to their dress. (Well that's a good
reason.)

Throughout the four day atrocity and
seizure by the al-Shabab terrorists of Somalia, starting on the
second day the Kenyan rulers issued daily claims that the battle was
over. These assertions proved to be, shall we say, premature. There
were also various claims about Americans and Brits being among the
assailants, and one or more women. There was reason to be suspicious
of the claims about American and British terrorists, due to the lack
of specifics presented, and the obvious desire of the Kenyan elite to
enlist more support from the U.S. and Europe.

Recently-elected
Kenyan President Kenyatta* (who is under indictment at the
International Criminal Court at The Hague, along with his deputy
president) asserted that forensic experts (Kenyan ones? or foreign?)
would examine the corpses of the terrorists to determine their
identities, blurring earlier assertions by Kenya’s foreign minister
that Americans and a Briton were involved in the siege.“Intelligence
reports had suggested that a British woman and two or three American
citizens may have been involved in the attack,” Kenyatta*
said.
“We cannot confirm the details at present but forensic experts are
working to ascertain the nationalities of the terrorists.” Well
maybe you could at least determine their genders?
How hard could that
be? [2]Kenyatta*
mentioned
that three floors of the mall had collapsed, without explaining how
or why.Kenyatta*
also
claimed that five terrorists were killed and eleven others were in
custody. He left murky if the eleven were attackers or accomplices
rounded up elsewhere, as has been suggested by media reports.Various
witnesses reported that some terrorists managed to escape by blending
into fleeing crowds. “Western
security officials” also thought this may have happened. If
so, that is indicative of grossly incompetent policing and lack of
control of the crime scene. [3]Kenyan
official ineptness has been on jarring display throughout the
terrorist siege. Like something out of a lurid Hollywood
agit-propaganda movie, a handful of terrorists (no more than 15 at
the top end of estimates) seized a 5 story mall including 80 stores,
killed probably 130 or so people once the full death toll is properly
tallied, and held off hundreds of “elite” Kenyan soldiers (with
their Israeli, American, British, and French advisers in the
background to hold their hands) with armored personnel carriers and
helicopters, for
four days.
And not because hostage-rescue teams were conducting negotiations. It
was combat all the way. What a pathetic performance by the Kenyans.No
surprise there: this is a country that recently had a fire at its
international airport that civilians with buckets of water had to put
out since the airport lacked even a single fire engine. Typical
African country ruled by a selfish, feckless, greedy elite. (But all
the blame goes to Western Imperialism, don't you know.)Nor
can this attack really be considered a surprise, as various secret
police agencies have known for several years that Westgate Mall was a
potential terrorist target, and had been scouted by the terrorists
previously. [The CIA has a large station in Nairobi.]And
there have been plenty of previous terrorist attacks in Kenya, such
as the truck-bombing of the U.S. embassy in 1998 attributed
to al-Qaeda,
which
killed 200 people (almost all Kenyans), a 2002 attack on an Israeli
hotel in Kenya, and a failed attempt to shoot down an El Al airliner
with a surface to air missile. (The
Shabab also like to attack churches and mosques in Kenya. That's
because they're very religious, you see. Other ways the Shabab and
their ilk prove
how religious they are is by murdering people who they deem out of
conformity with their dress code, cutting off the hands of musicians,
destroying all art, and burying teenage girls up to their necks and
throwing rocks at their heads until they're dead. And
they're big on chopping off people's heads, just like their Saudi
paymasters- and Wahhabism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia, is
the ideological wellspring of jihadism.)
[4]It's
obvious that two things the Islamofascists would like to totally
extirpate from all of our lives are pleasure
and freedom.Al-Shabab
also punished Uganda for contributing troops to the African
expeditionary
force in Somalia, with multiple
bombings
of the crowds
gathered to enjoy the World Soccer Cup in 2010, killed 76 people. (A
fine way to prevent people from enjoying sports. Sports are
“UnIslamic” anyway.)One
of the people al-Shabab murdered in the Mall
Massacre
was the leading poet of Ghana- a great
“victory”
for them, in their eyes, I suppose. (Maybe they heard of Hermann
Goering's quip “Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my
gun,” and took it to heart.) “Kenya
will not get peace unless they pull their military out of Somalia,”
ranted
Ali Mohamoud Rage, the all-too-appropriately-named
Shabab
spokesman, in a screed
broadcast over the radio.
Al-Shabab
has also been blasting out giddy boasts via Twitter about their
terrorist massacre at the Mall. (Despite their hatred for modernity,
and a desire to recreate their demented version of an eighth century
society, the various Islamofascists
are perfectly happy to avail themselves of such modern technologies
as radio, the Internet, automatic firearms, powerful explosives,
internal combustion engine motor vehicles, jet planes, and so on- all
things that if goons like them had been running the world all these
centuries, wouldn't even exist. But one item of modern technology
they do reject- vaccines. And in Pakistan for example they enforce a
ban on them by murdering health care workers.)At
the same time, President Kenyatta
called
the terrorists “cowards,” an absurdity parroted by his
fellow-ICC-defendant,
deputy president William
Ruto. (We heard the same inanity in the U.S. after the airliner
kamikaze attacks on 9/11/01. What, aren't words like terrorist
or monster
or evil
scum insulting
enough? Is “coward” the worst thing someone can be? Anti-human
nihilist
is much worse, in my
book.)They
are certainly no heroes
to any normal human being, as they are not admirable,
but obviously they did not lack courage,
unfortunately. I wish they had
been cowards, in which case they
would have been unable to pull off their
four day long carnival
of carnage.Both
Kenyatta and al-Shabab declared themselves victors. That's a matter
of perspective. (To
the rest of us, neither look good.) But
there's no question who the losers are in this round: humanity,
decency, civilization are.[5]*
I
wonder, will we ever have an American president named Americaman?[1]
The
current New Yorker
has a poignant article about a Somali chef who left a successful life
in London (where he owned restaurants and has a wife and children) to
return to Somalia to open restaurants and a hotel there to return
life to the country. Needless to say, his businesses have been bombed
repeatedly and al-Shabab has announced their intention to murder him.
(“Letter From
Somalia:Now Serving,”
New Yorker,
Sept. 30, 2013.)

[2]
“Kenya’s
President Says Mall Attackers Are ‘Defeated,’” New
York Times,September
24, 2013.[3]
Ibid.[4]
“Gunmen Kill Dozens in Terror Attack at Kenyan Mall,” New
York Times,September
21,
2013.[5]
If we refer to the notional terrorist playbook the terrorism
“experts” like to cite, I guess we have to chalk this one up as a
win for the terrorists. Using a small number of attackers, they
caused great economic damage to Kenya, striking its tourism industry,
probably scaring off investment, and also scoring a political blow,
making the Kenyan government appear weak and unable to defend the
country. The terrorists appear strong, able to strike at will, in a
fashion that generates great worldwide publicity for them. So they
maximize their impact with a small, expendable force, upending an
entire nation. Time
to wipe them out already. But pay
compensation
when you kill the wrong people with your drones or whatever, U.S.!
That's both the moral
thing to do and the pragmatic
thing to do, if you really want to win your “War on Terror”TM
and not multiply your enemies, like in The
Sorcerer's Apprentice. You
see how “realism” and morality are generally one
and the same,
in the long term, on the fundamental level?

Monday, September 23, 2013

GOP Senator John McCain was mightily
peeved by Vladimir Putin's New York Times op-ed piece, planted
there with the help of the
US “public
relations” (private propaganda)
firm Ketchum.(Then again, McCain The Cranky is easily peeved. You might
say he's chronically peeved, except when he's downright enraged.)

Putin actually put forth a strong
argument against U.S. military action against the Assad regime in
Syria. I don't agree with it, but the U.S. establishment has chosen
to respond in the main not with refutation and counterargument but
with dismissive contempt. McCain took it up a notch with a personal
attack on Putin. [1]

Thus,
McCain didn't bother refuting Putin's points. McCain just wanted to
blast Putin for being a tyrant (and I'm not a Putin fan because I'm
not a fan of autocrats, period). But ad hominem attacks don't
refute the arguments of one's opponent. (At least not if one applies
the rules of logic and reason, which are rarely applied, so I guess
they don't count.) [2]

Big McC says that Putin “has
made her [Russia] a
friend to tyrants
and an enemy
to the oppressed,
and untrusted
by nations that seek to build a safer, more peaceful and prosperous
world."
Arguably true. [I wonder
what “nations that seek to build safer, more blah blah blah world”
The
Cainster had in mind? Give you one guess.]

But
doesn't Honest John
McCain's description of
Russia exactly describe
the U.S.? Its friends are different
tyrants, to be sure. And certainly other nations mistrust
the U.S., especially after its conquest of Iraq, based on lies, and
now the exposé
of the extent of NSA spying on everybody, from presidents to average
citizens.

And
the awful truth is that globally, no nation in the modern era has
been a greater enemy to the oppressed than the U.S. The examples are
too numerous to mention, the record of the details stretching to
thousands of pages, so I will just cite a few salient examples to
make the point here. (We'll leave aside the blindingly obvious
examples of slavery, and genocide against the American Indians.)

It
is standing U.S. policy to side with rich elites in every country it
meddles and intervenes in, against the interests of the poor
majority. Haiti is a perfect example of this U.S. behavior. Then we
have invasions (such as Dominican Republic in 1965) and coups (Iran
1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, for example) designed to overthrow
leaders and destroy governments that threaten to use a nation's
resources for the benefit of the population of that nation. There are
the numerous military juntas the U.S. has backed- what is more
oppressive than that? The U.S. thinks propaganda is more
powerful than facts, and all its politicians and propagandists have
to do is prattle endlessly about their love and devotion to freedom
and democracy and human rights and all that good stuff. But
actions speak louderthan words.

The
truth is, the U.S. works globally on behalf of the rich against the
poor. It systematically works to sabotage progressive politicians,
activists, labor organizers, and scholars, even arranging their
assassinations. It works to prevent the rise to power of progressive
politicians wherever and whenever it can. (When they do manage to
come to power, they are immediately treated as enemies, such
as with Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, and Morales in
Bolivia, among others. And look what they did to Allende in Chile!
Arbenz in Guatemala got off easy by comparison- his life was spared,
but not those of 250,000 and counting of his countrymen since 1954.)

McCain
The Pain also
thundered in his
indictment that Putin and
his regime "punish
dissent and imprisonopponents.
They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass,
threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to
self-governance. To perpetuate their power they foster rampant
corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorize
and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption."

Again,
that's pretty close to a word for word description of the state of
affairs in the U.S., with some caveats. Just dealing with the Obama
regime: the Punish
dissent and imprison opponents part
is obvious. (In the
imprison category, John Kiriakou, Chelsea (Bradley)
Manning, Barrett
Brown, Edward Snowden if
they can get their hands on him, and
numerous dissidents
unknown to the general public, and they would have locked up Internet
activist Aaron Swartz if he hadn't committed suicide first. In the
punish category, many more dissidents, such as Occupy Movement
protesters, are
subjected to beatings, pepper-sprayings, secret police stalking and
persecution, and whistle-blowers
are subjected to FBI raids and close brushes with imprisonment such
as Thomas Drake and William Binney.) Or
just review the history of the 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, and earlier
periods. [In fact read some
books on the subject- here's a link to some.]

Election
rigging? McCain's own
party has done plenty of that, via
the fixed voting machines foisted on us by the
Republican-owned companies
that make them, and most notoriously the stolen 2000 Presidential
election. [3]

Media
control? True, the
U.S. government doesn't control the media. But the Obama regime has
broken new ground in attempts at intimidation and spying targeting
the corporate establishment media itself.
It has run massive electronic spying campaigns against the AP and Fox
News (and those are just the ones we know about!) and menaced
journalists with criminal investigations (and a sealed indictment
against Julian Assange, and who knows who else).

Harass,
threaten and banish organizations that defend your right to
self-governance? When
has the U.S. not
done that? The secret police in the U.S. systematically attack any
group that threatens established power. Again, the fate of the Occupy
Movement is a recent example. Anti-war groups are targeted not just
by the FBI, CIA, local and state police, and others, but even by the
military, which infiltrates, spies on, and disrupts them. The U.S. is
ruled by corporate oligarchs who control both the national and
various state legislatures.

How
about Foster corruption in the courts and economy?

Too
many examples here- thousands, at least- to list, so let's just name
a few: Ever hear of the dirty deals done to deregulate the financial
industry? Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury secretary, helped
orchestrate that, and subsequently went to his reward (don't call it
a bribe!)- a multimillion dollar a year sinecure at Citigroup.

We
have just come through a period of systematic fraud by banks and
credit rating agencies that created mortgages for deliberately
overvalued homes issued to borrowers who would obviously never be
able to repay them, rated the resulting “securities” Triple-A
(the highest, “safest” rating) and fobbed them off on chump
institutional investors. After that, there was an (ongoing) period of
fraudulent foreclosures, with thousands of fictitious signatures on
legal filings with courts, which looked the other way. (That's a
twofer- corruption of the courts AND of the economy.)

Corruption
of the courts: take theInslaw scandal, referenced below. Or
the systematic theft of billions of dollars in resource royalty
payments owed to Indian tribes by the U.S., which went on for
decades, including under Clinton (and probably continues today).

Meanwhile,
people like Maher Ararcan't even sue the U.S. Arar is the
Canadian that the U.S. seized off a plane as he was flying home. (He
was not even entering the U.S. but merely in transit back to Canada
from a vacation.) He was falsely branded a terrorist by the “Royal”
Canadian Mounted Police, so the U.S. secret police shipped him off to
Syria for a year of torture and imprisonment in an underground grave.
The U.S. merely had to intone the magic words “National Security”
and the U.S. courts said he couldn't sue. Meanwhile, the corrupt Tom
DeLay has just had his criminal conviction overturned on appeal.
Funny how it always works out that way. (I could fill a lengthy tome
with more examples.)

Then
there's a “secret” court, the “Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act” court, which rubber-stamps warrant requests by
the secret police- something like 36,000- while rejecting about a
dozen, during its existence. Sounds fair, right? No one ever knows
what it does, or who it spies on (everyone, we have learned from
Edward Snowden's exposé
of the NSA), or why.

Finally
we come to “terrorize
and even assassinate journalists”
who threaten to expose those in power. We have a very recent example
of that: the murder of Michael Hastings by elements of the deep
state. Apparently lured to a meeting under false pretenses, his car
was taken over by hacking into its computer system at 4:30 in the
morning and driven at high speed into a tree, but apparently after a
bomb planted inside exploded, leaving the engine 200 feet behind
the wrecked car. (The laws of physics would dictate that if it flew
out of the car after hitting the tree- which it couldn't, since the
tree would be in the way- it would have continued forward, just as
JFK's head snapping violently backwards
in Dealey Plaza in Dallas proves a bullet struck him from in front,
fired from the grassy knoll.)

Danny Casolaro was investigating the
Inslaw scandal
(an unbelievable example of corruption in the U.S. Federal Judiciary
and Executive branch- read about it at the link)
when
he suddenly turned up dead in a hotel bathtub with his wrists slit,
baffling his family and friends. This
was a murder by the deep state made to look like a suicide. But don't
take my word for it; "I
believe he was murdered," no less than former Attorney General
Elliot Richardson wrote in the NewYork Times. (Casolaro received numerous threatening phone calls prior to his death.)

We
have the unresolved case of the “suicide” of Gary Webb. Webb
wrote a series about the CIA's use of drug smuggling to fund the
contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua during the Reagan regime of the
1980s. (A standard CIA practice since its very founding, since
illegal drugs provides the CIA with untraceable, “off the books”
funds, thus cutting Congress completely out of the loop and creating
a state within a state with its own treasury department in effect.)
Webb published these articles in the SanJose
(California) Mercury-News, a second or third-tier newspaper in
the U.S. media hierarchy.

Despite
the fact that the story was absolutely true (and in fact reported
earlier in the “alternative” media) the high priests of truth
like the New York Times and Washington Post savaged the series and
Webb's paper repudiated his work and fired Webb, in cowardly fashion.
Webb was blacklisted by the establishment media and thus couldn't
find employment in his profession. Ultimately he committed “suicide,”
supposedly.

It
is an open question whether, driven to despair by the media turning
him into a pariah, he killed himself, or whether once again a
vengeful CIA exercised its specialty of
murder-made-to-look-like-suicide. (Easy for them to do, and they've
had plenty of practice.) Either way, the power establishment bears
the brunt of responsibility for Webb's death.

Much
of the terrorism
against journalists takes the form of legal terrorism, with
threats of imprisonment for not revealing sources (as NY
Times reporter James
Risen is currently facing) or for “criminal conspiracy” with
whistle-blowers for revealing “classified” information. Of
course murdering journalists is also a good way to terrorize the rest
of them. As the Chinese saying goes: “Kill one, frighten a
thousand.”

But
we also have to look at the systematic, ongoing murder of journalists
in U.S.-backed regimes in Honduras and Colombia. That is also on the
U.S. ledger. And Mexico, one of the most dangerous places on earth
for journalists, is also supported by the U.S. There journalists are
either murdered by drug cartels protected by the police and state,
which are indifferent or complicit in these murders, or murdered
directly by state actors. The numbers slaughtered in these
U.S.-allied nations vastly outnumber the handful assassinated in
Russia.

Russia
even has multiparty elections and a legislature, just like the U.S.
And there is a small independent media (just as there is a small one
in the U.S.) and visible dissidents (again, like the U.S.).

There
is an important difference between Russia and the U.S.: in
Russia, billionaires can be crushed by the state. That can never
happen in the U.S.

Obviously
we would be naïve to take at face value the honeyed words of Putin
in his civilized, reasonable mode, or the pumped up moral indignation
of a Vietnam War criminal and reactionary militarist like McCain.

But
perhaps we should take heart in the fact that nowadays, imperialists
and oppressors of all stripes feel compelled to talk
as if they're democrats and friends of human rights. If hypocrisy is
indeed the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it seems that the
power-wielding oppressors must now make regular payments.

1]
Putin marred what would have been a strong brief for his case by
repeating the insulting and grotesque canard that it was the rebels
who gassed their own enclave. That aside, his arguments were, in
brief: 1) the
UN was established to make sure that matters of war and peace would
be decided by consensus. This has underlain
international stability after World War II; 2)
when “influential” [read: powerful] countries bypass the UN, it
risks turning it into another League of Nations, that is, impotent
and doomed; 3)
a U.S. attack is widely opposed, including by the Pope, would create
innocent victims, and would lead to regional chaos and terrorism,
make more difficult resolutions to the Iranian nuclear question and
Israeli-Palestinian problem, and undermine international law and
stability; 4) the
battle in Syria isn't about democracy, but
a battle for power by many factions, and
foreign jihadists are present, presenting a danger to Russia and
other nations as they migrate out of Syria; 5)
a U.S. strike without
UN sanction would violate international law, and ; 6)
U.S. unilateralism has led to bad outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Libya. Oh, and 7)
the U.S. isn't “exceptional,” it's just another nation among
others, because remember, “ God created us equal.” (The neo-Czar
has discarded the official atheism of the “Marxist”-Leninist
Soviet Union and re-embraced
the reactionary and authoritarian Russian Orthodox Church, a natural
ally, just as the Roman Catholic Church has proven a reliable ally of
fascist and reactionary regimes the world over. These
are examples of what I call authoritarian
symbiosis.)

Putin
also offered a teaser of “cooperation on other international
issues” if the U.S. plays ball on Syria, no
doubt to put in there to get the Obama regime salivating in
anticipation of Russian help on Iran and other matters.
[“Give Us The Head Of
Edward Snowden!” I can envision the U.S. demanding, again.]

[2]
McCain
also objected to being called "an
active anti-Russian politician," asserting that "I am
pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you
today."
Hey John, maybe now you know how it feels to people who criticize
U.S. policies and its socio-economic status quo when they're branded
“anti-American,” including by guys like you. Or even called
“traitors” for performing public services, like Edward Snowden
and Chelsea (neé
Bradley)
Manning.

And
speaking of regimes that are enemies of their own people, there's
nothing like the NSA
in Russia that monitors and stores ALL the communications of ALL its
citizens, surreptitiously, and passes what it finds to the FBI
and CIA and
DEA
and IRS and
god knows who else
for laundering and use in bringing criminal cases and harassment and
persecution against domestic “enemies,” NOT
“terrorists.” (Although
the secret police routinely
brand
their enemies, like the Occupy Movement, environmentalists, and
anti-war activists, “terrorists.”) In
fact, no other nation on earth, not even North Korea, or China (that
we know, although, inspired by the U.S. example, they might try it)
does to
its citizens what the NSA is doing .

3]
And 2004 too. Ohio was stolen for Bush that year, giving him the
Electoral College votes he needed to “win.” The Democratic VP
nominee, John Edwards, wanted to fight it, but John Kerry, the
Presidential nominee, said no. Later Edwards was retaliated against
with a fraudulent criminal case brought by the Federal government
falsely claiming a campaign contribution violation- Edwards won at
trial- and a never-ending media vilification of Edwards over his
sexual affair while his wife had breast cancer. Why,
what a beastly cad! As
usual in the U.S., any politician with progressive tendencies (such
as Edwards) must be neutralized, marginalized, or destroyed as a
threat to the reactionary system.